Analyzing a patent portfolio of any significant size can be a time consuming task. Although patents are usually drafted to conform to certain stylistic rules, it still takes considerable time to review a collection of patents, particularly when the patent claims are also taken into account.
Managers of large patent portfolios need a way to organize their portfolios so that they and their business colleges can quickly grasp what the portfolio covers. In the past, it has been customary to construct a database for this purpose, listing each patent in the portfolio by patent number, title, inventor's name, issue data, and so forth. Much of the information contained in such a database may be captured from the face of the patent document itself and then displayed in tabular form. Of course, a very important part of every patent is its claims. While it may be possible to include the claims in a patent database of conventional design, doing so does not significantly enhance the database's value as a portfolio analysis tool for the following reason.
Unlike patent numbers, filing dates, and short titles, patent claims are comparatively verbose and thus not well suited for presentation in tabular form for quick review. Therefore, although the patent claims remain an important part of every patent in the portfolio, conventional at-a-glance portfolio analytic tools do not convey much information about the scope of the patent claims. While conventional database analytic tools will tell, for example, how many patents were applied for or issued in a given year, they will not tell much about the actual scope of what those patents cover. What is needed, therefore, is an analytic tool that allows patent scope to be quickly assessed, even when dealing with large portfolios.
Similar difficulties arise when reviewing patent office records for product clearance opinions. The attorney conducting the clearance opinion identifies potentially relevant patent classes and subclasses and then reviews the claims of the patents in those classes and subclasses to determine if any may be potentially pertinent. Whether the review is conducted using printed paper copies or electronic copies on line, the task is essentially the same. The attorney reviews the claims, patent by patent, until all of the potentially relevant ones have been considered. Frequently the patents are arranged in chronological order by issue date for example. Thus, there is likely to be little correlation from one patent to the next. Again, it would be desirable to have a tool that would present some easily grasped information about the claim coverage of each patent, so that the patents could be grouped or arranged in a more logical order for review.
The present invention provides such a tool. The patent portfolio analyzer of the invention analyzes selected claims of each patent, such as all independent claims of each patent, and associates with those claims additional claim scope indicia that the analyzer uses to control how the pertinent patent data is displayed.
In one embodiment, the indicia represents a claim breadth metric that may be used to, for example, sort the patent in order of increasing or decreasing claim breadth. In another embodiment the indicia may include patent category information, whereby patents may be grouped together according to meaningful topics or subjects. If desired, the topics or subjects can be technology categories, product categories or other business categories that are familiar to the audience that will be reviewing the results of the analysis.
The patent categories may be automatically generated and assigned using information extracted from the patents themselves. In a technology where the patent office patent classification system maps well onto the desired business categories, these may be used to automatically assign patents to the proper category. Alternatively, or additionally, linguistic analysis techniques may be applied to the text of the patents (e.g., claims, specification, abstract, title, or any combination thereof). Through use of linguistic analytic techniques, the semantic content of the patent text is extracted and used in assigning patents to one or more business categories.
Although a variety of different linguistic techniques may be used in this regard, one presently preferred embodiment uses dimensionality reduction techniques to produce eigenvectors representing patents of known classification. Thereafter, patents of unknown classification are classified by placing or projecting those patents into the eigenspace defined by the eigenvectors of the known patent text. One benefit of the eigenvector technique is that it captures a priori knowledge about population of patent text and then uses this knowledge in classifying the text of other patents. The eigenvector classification technique forms clusters of patents having similar meaning, so that the portfolio analyzer can display them suitably grouped together.
The claim breadth and patent clustering mechanisms may be used separately or together. In a presently preferred embodiment, the analyzer takes the form of a database having data structures designed to associate a claim breadth metric with at least the independent claims of each patent in the portfolio or pertinent patent collection. The database further includes at least one data structure for storing an associated classification identifier for each patent in the portfolio or collection. The user then views information about the patents in the portfolio using either a local copy of the database with suitable on-screen forms or using a remote copy of the database which may be accessed over the Internet or other suitable network in a client-server or web server-browser configuration. A collection of predefined queries may be provided to allow the user to view the portfolio data in a variety of different ways, as will be more fully described herein.
For a more complete understanding of the invention, its objects and advantages, refer to the following specification and to the accompanying drawings.